My favorite toy as a young child was a set of old wooden blocks. I’d assemble these into towers taller than me, or into cantilevered structures that would grow until they came crashing down. I never really stopped since.

In 1998 I entered Stanford University, where I studied nearly everything but art — from engineering to philosophy to psychology — all the while continuing to make sculpture, sneaking into the mechanical engineering machine shop to do so.

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Entropy is the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder. It’s everywhere around us. But resisting entropy — developing and preserving structures — is very much a part of being human, and is a central aspect of every form of life.

In my sculptures I explore the line between order and disorder, combining intersecting parts into a whole that stands in delicate equilibrium on a small foot. Each work is inherently precarious, yet ultimately poised and stable, overcoming entropy. I use this narrow point of balance to connect viewers to something beyond the sculptural object itself. In each static form is tension, the suggestion of gesture or movement, the ephemeral moment between breathing in and out. There's potency and power in equilibrium, as well as grace, when the point of balance is reached.

As I would have said in my days as an engineer, this point of balance is where potential energy transitions into kinetic energy, and a form narrowly balanced can appear to contain both. For me the balance and the form in my sculptures are inseparable from each other, and I develop them through intuition, rather than any sort of calculation.

The poet Stanley Kunitz once described a poem’s structure as a way for it to contain and hold energy, and that the energy soon leaks out of a poorly formed work. I’ve found the same to true with sculpture. After twenty years of creating works like this, what others might see as a stylistic constraint is, for me, a language that I’m still learning, one that enables the expression of something I experience but otherwise couldn’t communicate.